“The Purge” To Become A TV Series

“The Purge has carved out a comfortable film franchise for itself, and on the eve of the third film’s home video release comes word that the series might be headed to television.

In a new interview with CinemaBlend, writer/director James DeMonaco said a TV version of the franchise is being planned, one that sounds like it would be a limited series in real time with multiple storylines and flashback elements (ala “Lost,” “Arrow”) which would allow for much more character development than the films have time to offer:

“They came to me about a TV show, my idea is that you do six or seven storylines. And I would kind of intercut them, use flashbacks. The idea of why I like the idea of a maybe 10 hour TV thing on this, the one thing you really can’t do on the films is, just because of mere real estate and time, is you can’t get into the nuance and complexity that would drive someone to commit a terrible act on this night….

What might be interesting in a TV show is with a flashback narrative, if you start on Purge Night, but you go back to show how people have gotten to where they are. Where you see a couple that’s gone haywire on this night, but let’s show everything that’s led up to this moment of a husband trying to kill a wife – the cheating, or the accusations of cheating, or money problems.

It will be interesting to show those arcs, those dramatic and complex arcs that get people to where they pick up a gun or a knife and kill someone else. I think there’s something cool that we can do with the real estate of TV – 10 hours, potentially.”

No fourth film in the series has yet been announced, but even if it goes forward DeMonaco says he won’t direct. He does have an idea for the story they could use though – a prequel showing how ‘The Purge’ came about:

“I don’t think I’ll direct it. I would actually go back and I would try to talk about how it all started. That seems the natural next chapter in this, is to say, ‘Alright, we’ve done this trilogy. We see how it got to this point of someone trying to end it – this presidential figure. Now let’s go back and see how the f–k all this came about.’ How did this country get to a place where we were now accepting this kind of atrocity, this terrible thing, each year? I think there’s something interesting in that. I don’t think I’ll direct, between you and I. You can print that, I mean. I’m thinking of maybe writing or at least producing it, to make sure it stays true to what I like about the movies.